


might be other cities half as raw as ours

by zinc_carpenter



Category: Banlieue 13 (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:14:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27572131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zinc_carpenter/pseuds/zinc_carpenter
Summary: Banlieue 13 claims its children from the cradle.
Relationships: Leïto/the banlieue, me/pretentious bullshit
Kudos: 1





	might be other cities half as raw as ours

**Author's Note:**

> look i don’t know what this is either. the thesis is the city as character, and if i actually knew how to write it i’d lean much harder on the city as lover, too. since i clearly don’t know how to write that, take this in place of content with actual substance.

Banlieue 13 claims its children from the cradle. They’ll never wash that grit from beneath their nails, the smell of cheap ethnic foods and hashish from their clothes, or the grit-bone grins, sharp-edged and sly, quick fingers telegraphing pickpocket impulses, from their bodies. Every middle class Parisian horror story comes to life on the trash strewn streets and graffiti-scrawled hallways of the banlieue. 

  
  


Leïto is a child of the barrio if ever there was one, if the title means anything at all. When he was too young and too small for anything but fleeing to be the best option, he learned that the banlieue bends and bows if you know the right way to treat her. So he learns movement, until motion becomes memory becomes instinct, until the city knows him and every scraped palm leaving blood staining gravel is a love mark, a kiss sealing the missive. 

  
  


The city spreads herself before him, beneath him, unfolding boulevards and avenues, back alleys and marketplaces, all teeming with knotted nerve centers of people. She throbs in his sore muscles, stings the soles of his feet through the worn-thin rubber of his sneakers, makes herself known in every wrenched muscle and pulled tendon. Afterwards, when drowsiness is settling through his limbs and adrenaline is replaced by the pleasant worked-out thrumming of well-exercised muscles, he luxuriates in the afterglow. 

  
  


Those in the banlieue who learn to fly have the sky in their eyes, and more anger, more spring-coiled fierceness, more motion memory violence; those who run the rooftops, who vault off ledges to catch themselves on drainpipes and drop cat’s paw light to the alleyways, in the back streets where blood cakes easily between the cobblestones. Because here's the thing Leïto learns, about slapping your palms down on a concrete roof ledge before you launch yourself into emptiness, windstream tugging at your clothing and the city sprawling out around you — if you don’t catch a glimpse of the Wall while you’re doing it, it can almost feel like freedom.

  
  


(In the spring, city air hangs moist on bare skin; humidity weighs on Leïto’s bones in the summer. Junkies curl in doorways like art installations and HLM hallways stink of stale vomit and old, molding plaster. Leïto smells like Moroccan street food. The city feels like home.)


End file.
